The latter is dependent on knowledge of God-concepts, which the former does not necessarily require.
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I believe there are no Gods
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The latter is dependent on knowledge of God-concepts, which the former does not necessarily require.
Belief in no God/Gods is a positive condition. There is a "belief" in question.
Lack of belief is a negative condition: there is no belief in question.
Of course there are no Gods but there is only one God
Prove it.
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
Otoh, playing the Devil's advocate, proove that such is NOT the case. The whole argument, for and against, is a canard imitating serious intellectual introspection.
So you are saying that anyone who claims more than a 50 / 50 possibility is not intellectually honest?
I don't think that's pretentious as it perfectly describes a certain position. Which is not knowing, and thus choosing not to believe.
For example, personally, i don't know whether or not there is a god(s). No idea whatsoever. There might be and there might be not. So, while i was once a believer in a god, i decided to step back and stop embracing this idea and stop acting based upon it.
That is not the same as acting as if there is no god. It is exactly just this: acting as if you don't know whether or not there is one, and as such, you neither base your foundation upon the idea that there is a god, or the idea that there isn't one.
This might be in essence the same as agnosticism, or at least one definition of it, but it also fits the "lack of belief" definition of atheism. And, most importantly, this is a real distinction and a different mindset to that of there not being a god. It's not mere word play.
Do you believe that I'm wearing a red shirt?
Probably not, since you can't see me and (AFAIK) you don't know what I like to wear. You lack the belief that I'm wearing a red shirt.
Do you believe that I'm NOT wearing a red shirt? Again, you have no idea what I'm wearing, so no, you don't believe that I'm not wearing a red shirt.
That's the difference.
AdityaMookerjee
Member
It seems, your belief is important. Why say, "I believe there is no God?" People wouldn't have known, if you did not say anything. What if you are right, and your belief is not required? And then, what if I am wrong, because you are right? It seems, we would both be in the same boat.
AdityaMookerjee
Member
A wise man thinks, that despair is also belief, because it seems we are looking in a manner different. We act in belief and repent, because if a person acts in despair, and takes his life, the world repents. Can a despairing man see belief in another? This question is important.
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
For OR against, yes. It's the cosmic gotcha. Try as we might, we are only preening our petty little ego's when we allow ourselves to believe otherwise.
lunakilo
Well-Known Member
Lacking belief in deities is not necessarily the same as belief that there are no deities.
The second statement is stronger than the first.
If you believe there are no deities that also implies that you lack belief in deities, but the opposite is not true.
A person could be unsure of the existence of deities. That person would lack belief in deities, but not believe there are no deities.
But it is all up to how you define atheism, volumes has been written about that (strong vs weak atheism/ Agnosticism vs atheism/...) Atheism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I think the most generally used definition is the broadest on, that atheism is the lack of belief in the existence of deities.
Orias
Left Hand Path
Funny... I see it as no less ego-preening to assign even odds of being right to a person's pet wild-*** guess of how the universe works.
You're committing the middle ground fallacy. The mere fact that a position is midway across the spectrum of possible options does not necessarily mean that it's the most reasonable.
Irrelevant for the point I was making. Do you understand what I was getting at with my analogy?
lunakilo
Well-Known Member
I believe red shirts exist?
lunakilo
Well-Known Member
The difference between "lacking belief in God" and "believing that there is no God" is that if you believe there is not god, then you have come to a decision on whether you believe in god or not.
If you simply lack belief it is possible that you just haven't decided what you believe.
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
I agree, if we were discussing any other topic rather than that of the existence or non-existence of god/gods. The subject matter itself simply does not lend itself to verification, which makes ANY strong statement, either way, laughable.
Ah - special pleading.
That just means that it's impossible to say for sure whether god-claims might have coincidentally ended up as correct guesses (except for all the ones that implicitly predict any evidence at all), but it would still imply that anyone making god-claims is speaking out of their butt with no rational justification for what they're saying.
It's rational to not believe in things for which there is no evidence. Most non-existent things have no evidence for or against them. OTOH, it's not rational to believe in things for which there is no evidence.